


Fathom Five

by Anonymous



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Brother/Brother Incest, Incest by Proxy, M/M, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Oral Penetration With a Foreign Object, Rape By Proxy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 09:53:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29293983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The Lieutenant acts as stand-in.
Relationships: Amon/Lieutenant/Tarrlok (Avatar)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: Anonymous





	Fathom Five

**Author's Note:**

> As always, @vincestsaga on twitter for more brocontent 👍

The cold is always with a waterbender. There are oceans around the center of the Earth that lie beneath the sun, but the waters of the Northern and Southern seas are the heart of waterbending. Only the light of the sun touches the Northern Water Tribe. Heat is something they make for themselves.

Any body of water that reaches deep enough becomes cold eventually. In the deepest recesses of the sea, all heat and light are stripped away. Humans may charter their pleasure cruises around the center of the planet, where the sun beats down hard enough to bake passengers in their bathing chairs. But fish pulled from the depths of the sea below are pale, contorted by pressure. Human and fish alike can be bloodbent, though there's little reward in bloodbending a fish. Tarrlok's tried to avoid both. Perhaps it makes no difference, in a fish's tiny mind, whether it's being lifted by the moisture in its body, or by a punctured lip. Either way ends in suffocation.

In the end, a fish is just a fish. No fish ever spared a thought for the other fish it's swallowed up in its life. Fish have to eat, and humans have to eat, and fish are delicious. Lucky the human who can outwit the fish, and luckier still the humans who can bend the very elements and fish deeper, tunnel further, fly higher than the common human. How lucky, then, is the gifted among the gifted, the bender among benders? And how lucky are the humans who surround the gifted, that they are spared being turned into the fish on the line that they might be, so easily.

Tarrlok tries to avoid it. It's his father's tool. And it's easily discovered. Blood's not the only fluid he can bend. It's been a question of self-defense the few times he's used it. His attire is of the Water Tribe, after all, and suspicions mount easily against the successful.

Right now Tarrlok's blood is heating in his veins, without shame. He knows better than anyone the feeling of one's own blood being forced to turn traitor. But that isn't what's happening. Maybe that's a kindness. Maybe it isn't.

"Embarrassing." Amon's voice is chillier without the mellowing quality of a radio broadcast behind it. "But your reputation precedes you, Councilman. No doubt the familiar position is a comfort."

The man holding the stick in Tarrlok's mouth chuckles. It's a deep sound, and the hand smoothing his hair is almost gentle.

"That's not one of your good kali sticks, is it, Lieutenant?"

"No. I keep those clean."

"Good. I'd hate to inconvenience you over something so trivial."

A politician's mouth is his most dangerous weapon. So says Amon, the most popular politician in Republic City. So this politician's mouth is being probed. Tarrlok knows how to give head, and he knows that's what's expected of him. That's why his pants are around his knees.

Amon is across the room. That wouldn't have made any difference to Tarrlok, the bloodbender. It doesn't make any difference now, to Tarrlok the non-bender. He hears Amon as waves in the air. He's deaf now to the pulsing of veins that was always accessible, before. Once it was like carrying a conch shell with him. If he chose, he could lift it to his ear and feel the rush of blood traveling through every living being around him. He tries not to avoid bending. But he listens, sometimes. That's how it always was, before.

Well, not always. Not for most of the time he and his brother were together. Now, again, he's weak and his brother is strong. This time, Amon is not the brother who became a waterbender by Tarrlok's side. Only Tarrlok's traveled backwards in time. The blood in this room—three bodies full—is as insensate as the polished wood beneath his spread fingertips. His heartbeat is racing, his cock is flushed from the humiliation. This is the only way he'll feel the water inside him from now on.

The stick in his mouth is just as lifeless. Thin and with a slight aftertaste of varnish. He might as well be licking the floor. But if Amon's lieutenant shoves it in any further, it'll set off his gag reflex, and that, of all the humiliations he's lived through in the past few days, is a step too far.

That's one more kind of fluid inside human beings. Why couldn't his father have been a vomitbender instead? The thought almost makes him choke on a laugh. Surely Amon couldn't use that to take anyone's bending. If only their family line were less dignified.

"All the advantages in the world and still you _stoop_ to make your way up the ladder. Sex, bribery, intimidation. When is enough enough, Councilman?" The footsteps behind him turn and retrace their steps. "Bending must be a form of intoxication."

"It's almost closing time." The lieutenant inches the stick further into his mouth, and Tarrlok draws his head backwards to accommodate it. The movements of his tongue stay regular. Not that anyone can appreciate it but him.

"Precisely." Amon seizes on the idea with the deftness of a practiced orator. "Think of this as an intervention. Republic City is long overdue a reckoning. Soon enough the haze will clear, and the _haves_ will finally see the _have-nots_ crushed beneath their feet."

It was a bloodbending grip that Tarrlok felt reach inside him and take his bending. Even if he could speak, there's no retort he could make. Amon's refined that one movement to invisibility. To the untrained eye, it's magic.

Besides, he lost the match. His brother has the advantage, as he always did. No one listens to a loser who complains that the fight was rigged.

"I'm afraid your bag of tricks is one smaller now, Councilman. But you'll manage. Some techniques are more universal than bending."

The water inside a human never gets as deep as the seas. Blood stays warm, as long it keeps pumping. It takes the outside world to crush all heat from the human body. Is it any wonder that a man would seek out the little warmth that men and women can pass between each other?

There's some slight truth to the rumors. Tarrlok's slept with a few people who've done him favors. But he's always paid his debts with more than that. He has plenty to offer the powerful. Why not spend the night, besides, when you meet someone you can get along with? But of course Amon would see the worst in it. He's known, all along. He was watching and listening before Tarrlok ever heard the word Equalist.

The stick digs painfully into the soft tissues of his mouth. Real cock is more forgiving. This is penetration for the sake of penetration. A bloodless humiliation. His own cock responds—to what? to the shame? to the knowledge that this is his own brother? to the simple fact that someone, behind him, is _looking_ at him?

Maybe that's it. Who goes into politics for anything else?

Someone snaps his fingers. It must be Amon, from the sound's distance. The man holding Tarrlok's hair pulls his head off the stick, leaving him unfulfilled and empty.

"I think we'll spare him the cavity search, Lieutenant. We captured him in the ice and snow. Waterbenders become arrogant there. They never expect the playing field to be leveled."

Tarrlok knows the trick. A small concession near the end leaves the opponent feeling grateful for the kindness, no matter how cruel you were. He's relieved nonetheless. It's a trick that works.

"I'll have him moved off the island, if you're satisfied he's harmless." Tarrlok can see the man's face now. A little smile, the same shape as the one on Amon's mask, lifts the tendrils of his mustache on either side.

"No, I'll be keeping this one here."

The lieutenant's glance toward his commander is one of surprise. Tarrlok must be receiving a rare honor. "Still plenty of empty cells left."

"I'm sure our guards are dedicated," Tarrlok's brother tells the lieutenant of his revolution. "But I don't need him rallying the prisoners from his knees."

Amon is no more readable now that Tarrlok is looking at him. The mask is utterly implacable. But then he never could read Noatak near the end, either. Maybe the mask isn't even necessary.

"Of course, sir." The man forces Tarrlok to his legs, holding a kali stick to his ribs.

It was never his people Tarrlok was fleeing. Nor was it the cold that shapes them. He speaks for his tribe in the Council, and he visits Water Tribe restaurants to eat the flesh of animals that live only in the cold, and he keeps furs in his home that serve no purpose most of the year, here in the city that chewed up his father and him and spat them both out just the same. It's a deeper cold, one that starts in the marrow of the bones. Maybe it's the destiny of all bloodbenders to flee what they sense more keenly than any other. But the cold stays and follows. It lingers in the blood and the flesh.

"You've got the wrong idea about me. Some of my best friends are non-benders." The roof of his mouth is sore. His lips aren't quite numb, but they taste wrong when he licks them, and feel wrong when they meet each other. Tarrlok keeps talking. It sounds he'll have no one but himself to talk to after this. "My mother, for example."

"Shut up," says the lieutenant, digging the stick sharply between two ribs.

"Lucky woman," Amon says. "Her son's finally been brought down to earth with her."

"It's a little late for that." It's not that he needs Amon to know this. But a politician without an audience is like a bender robbed of his element. Even a bloodbender hates to bend his own blood.

"My condolences," Amon says evenly, turning away. "Lieutenant, pass our guest along and hurry back. I want to be sure I'm up to date on everyone who'll be onstage at my rally."

Tarrlok forces his own feet forward so that he's not being dragged. He still has this, at least. Upwards to a little attic, where bars have already been installed. That's unlikely to be the work of airbenders, as troublesome as they've made themselves in the past. Amon must have had some of his men prepare the place.

"There's a curfew for non-benders, you know," Amon's lieutenant tells him, as the door clangs shut. Unlike the prisons operated by metalbenders, this one needs keys. At least there are more openings for light to enter his cell.

"I know," says Tarrlok. "That was my law."

The lieutenant gives the bars of his cell a sour kick. That tells Tarrlok there are orders against brutalizing this particular prisoner. The metal bars ring for a few moments. He's never paid much attention to the rhythm and vibration of the other elements, but now all elements are equally beyond his reach, and the sound stays in his ears long after the bars themselves have stilled. A true Equalist victory.

After one's lived long enough in warmer climes, it seems strange that the poles of the earth could feel the same light from the same sun, and yet none of the heat. It seems strange that the sun could deny so much of itself to the top and the bottom of the world. Members of the Water Tribe make their own heat, and store it with clever building and thick furs. They are their own suns.

One forgets, until it's all brought back, how much colder the nights are once the sun has vanished.


End file.
